by Tommy Lee
My parents couldn’t stop me, my principal couldn’t stop me, and Horace, the biggest high-school football player around, couldn’t stop me. That’s probably what gave me a feeling of invulnerability that my experiences in Mötley Crüe did nothing to dispel. Without that, I probably never would have had the confidence to lead a ragged, punch-drunk band like Mötley Crüe when the opportunity came. The first thing I did when Mötley Crüe became famous was climb into a white stretch limo and ask the chauffeur to drive me to my old schoolyard, where I flipped off all the teachers and yelled “fuck you, assholes!” out of the window as loudly as I could. In my mind, they had failed me. I didn’t need them at all.
I did not think that I’d ever get taught a lesson, because I had no use for lessons. I didn’t read, I didn’t write, I didn’t think. I just lived. Whatever happened in the past happened, whatever’s going to happen in the future is going to happen anyway. Whatever is happening in the present moment was always what I was interested in. So when my moment of reckoning came, I had already committed thirty-four years of my life to invincibility. Not only did I not expect it, but I couldn’t even conceive of the possibility. Fate, however, has a way of finding your vulnerabilities where you least expect them, illuminating them so that you realize how glaringly obvious they are, and then mercilessly driving a spike straight into their most delicate center.
Our attitude was: Fuck Vince, dude. He was lazy, he didn’t care, he didn’t contribute to Mötley Crüe, and he had no fucking respect for any of us. He became a punching bag: united against motherfucking Vince. We even put a picture of him on the back of the toilet, dude, so that when we went to the bathroom we could piss on his face.
But the bottom line was that Vince never put us down when he left the band. We put Vince down. So which of us was the asshole?
I didn’t talk to Vince for three years, six months, and six days after he left—until I heard that his daughter Skylar had slipped into a coma and died. That night, I called him at home. His voice wasn’t even recognizable as the Vince I knew. He sobbed, babbled, and hurled abuse at himself for an hour or more over the phone. It was all bad.
“That’s against the laws, man,” he kept screaming, bashing the phone against something. “It’s against the rules of the universe.”
I couldn’t understand a single thing in his crazy talk other than the fact that the guy was in extreme pain and had probably crawled inside a bottle to hide. I don’t know how he ever made it through that and managed to become a human being again. I don’t think he even remembers me calling.
At first, Sharise thought it was the flu. Skylar was complaining of stomach pains, headaches, and nausea, so Sharise put her to bed. That night, Skylar’s symptoms worsened. Her stomach started hurting so badly that she doubled over clutching it. When Sharise tried to take her to the bathroom, she discovered that Skylar was hurting too much to even walk. She wiped the dirty blond hair out of Skylar’s face, dabbed at the tears with a Kleenex, and drove her to the hospital.
That was when she called me at the Long Beach Grand Prix after-party. I drove to the West Hills Medical Center with more speed and adrenaline than I had used in the race and joined Sharise, who was crying on her mother’s shoulder in the hospital emergency room. The last hour had been a nightmare, they said. The doctors had assumed that Skylar’s appendix had exploded. But when they anesthetized her and began the procedure for an appendectomy, they found her appendix healthy and intact. Instead, they saw that a cancerous tumor around her abdomen had exploded, spreading cancer all through her body. The tumor, they said, was the size of a softball. I couldn’t understand how such a large tumor had appeared in Skylar: I always associated cancer and tumors with old people. Not my four-year-old.
After another hour, they let Sharise and me into the intensive care unit to see Skylar. When I saw her attached to all these tubes and machines, for once in my life I didn’t know what to do. This was my daughter hooked up to a life-support system. When I had seen her just a weekend ago, she’d been running circles around my legs trying to make me dizzy.
Sharise and I sat side by side without a word for the first time in two years, waiting for Skylar to stir. After an hour, she rolled around, mumbled something about Cinderella, and fell back asleep. Sharise and I looked at each other and wanted to cry with relief.
The next day, Skylar was almost fully conscious and lucid. And she was as scared as I had been the night before when I saw all the tubes and machines. She asked where she was and why she was there and what all this stuff was. We explained as gently as we could that she had something growing in her stomach, like a flower, but it wasn’t supposed to be there so the doctors took it out. She smiled weakly and said she wanted to go home.
I asked the doctors when I could take Skylar home, and they said that she needed to be transferred to the Children’s Hospital in Los Angeles first to make sure that they had removed all the fragments of the tumor. I had heard of the hospital because it was run by the T. J. Martell Foundation, which helps children with leukemia, cancer, and AIDS. Since Mötley Crüe had done a lot of charity work for the T. J. Martell Foundation over the years, like playing against Fleetwood Mac in their first rock-and-jock softball game benefit (we won), I called Tony Martell in tears and he made sure Skylar received the best care possible.
I rode to the Children’s Hospital in an ambulance with Skylar and, the moment we arrived, they ran a CAT scan on her. The thought of her being blitzed with radiation at such a young age sickened me, but I had no choice. Heidi had returned from Florida, so she waited with Sharise and me for the results. We sat there awkward, uncomfortable, and chewing our fingernails to the skin. When the doctor returned, whatever jealousy and ill will remained among the three of us was banished forever by the news. There were tumors, the doctor said, on both of Skylar’s kidneys. They would have to operate again to remove them. When we told Skylar, she buried her face in Sharise’s chest and asked again when she could go home. “Soon,” we told her. “Very soon.”
Music studios, strip clubs, concert halls, and any semblance of my past life disappeared as the hospital became the center of my existence. Even the divorce that Sharise and I had been wrestling over for two years was put on hold. Every day, Sharise, myself, our parents, or Heidi sat with Skylar in her room, praying that we could take her home soon. We kept saying just one more operation, just one more treatment, just one more day and it would all be over. But every day, the news got worse and worse.
When the doctors brought Skylar into the operating room to remove the tumors on her kidneys, they pulled back the flaps of her skin and were horrified by what they saw. The tumors were so large that simply removing them would have been fatal. They sewed her up yet again and told us she would have to undergo more radiation treatment. This way, they said, the tumors would shrink to a size at which they could be safely removed.
Gradually, I began drinking again to cope with the pain. I would stay at the Children’s Hospital as long as they’d let me, then I’d drive straight to Moonshadows in Malibu and get liquored up with the regulars until I couldn’t remember my own name. The next morning I’d wake up, drive to the hospital, stay all day or maybe even sleep over, and then get blitzed at Moonshadows. I knew it was wrong to be drinking at this time, but it was the only way I could keep from going completely crazy. My entire being was reduced to just three emotions: anxiety, depression, and anger. I was angry all the time. When some guy in a blue BMW cut me off on the Pacific Coast Highway, I slammed on the brakes and yelled, “Fuck you!” The guy stepped out of his car, I stepped out of mine. Heidi, who was in the passenger seat, yelled in horror, “What’s wrong with you?!” I stepped back into my car, spat on the windshield in anger, and was preparing to peel out when the guy threw himself over my hood and refused to move.
“That’s fucking it!” I yelled at Heidi. I stormed out of the car, slammed the door so hard the mirror fell off, pulled him off the hood by his shirt collar, and punched him in the face in
front of a crowd of gawkers. I punched him so hard that my knuckles split open to the bone. The guy dropped to the ground with blood streaming out of his face as if it had been split with an ax. Passersby had to call an ambulance to scrape him off the ground. I left before the cops arrived and gunned it to the hospital. I wasn’t going to waste any more time on this piece of shit.
As soon as I walked in, the doctors looked at the anger still seething on my face and then down at the blood coagulating on my hand and didn’t have to ask what had happened. They brought me into the X-ray room and informed me that I had broken my hand. They bandaged it and said there would be no charge. They knew what I was going through because they had seen it so many times before, though perhaps not to this exact degree of self-destructiveness.
More and more, I fell asleep at Skylar’s bedside crying and confused, frustrated that this cancer beyond my control was growing and consuming my daughter, my life, and our future together. Every time I returned to the hospital, Skylar was in more pain and confusion. We would watch Married… With Children in the hospital. Just a month ago, she used to drop whatever she was doing and dance around the house to the theme song, Frank Sinatra’s “Love and Marriage.” But now she just stared listlessly at the television, knocked out on morphine. If we were lucky, a smile would crack open across her face and send our hearts racing with happiness.
With the tumor on Skylar’s right kidney starting to press against her lungs, it was a losing battle trying to preserve that smile. I brought Skylar her favorite toys and the clothes she liked to dance in. We watched Disney videos and sang children’s songs together. Since I was now signed to Warner Bros. Records, I used my connections to bring entertainers in Bugs Bunny and Sylvester costumes to the hospital with big gift baskets for Skylar and the other children in the ward. On Easter, Heidi and I went to Sav-On and bought bags full of candy and Easter egg painting kits. Then I did something I never would have done for Mötley Crüe no matter how much they pleaded: I stripped out of my clothes and put on a giant, fuzzy Easter Bunny outfit.
Skylar didn’t even recognize me until I started talking, then she burst out laughing. I cried, and as the tears mingled with sweat under the outfit, I turned around and said, “Sharise, hand me those eggs.”
“What did you just call me?” came the curt, sharp, and angry voice of Heidi. Sharise wasn’t even in the hospital, and if there’s anything a girlfriend doesn’t forgive, it’s calling her by an ex’s name, even if it occurs at the sickbed of a child. For the next few minutes, Easter turned into Halloween as we put on a very different kind of show for the kids. For a relatively young girl in a new relationship, Heidi was under a lot of pressure she had never bargained for between the fact that I was still technically married and that all our dates were taking place in the presence of nurses and Sharise instead of waiters and friends. At first, everyone just saw her as a blond bimbo. But after months of Heidi hiring entertainers such as a Snow White impersonator, sitting at Skylar’s bedside, holding her hand every day, and being very careful not to compete or interfere with Sharise, the doctors and Sharise’s family eventually accepted her, though never quite enough to treat her like part of the family.
“Daddy,” Skylar asked when she woke up one morning, “I’m never going home, am I?”
“Of course you’re going home,” I said. And I wasn’t lying. The doctors had told me that we could take Skylar home and simply bring her in for chemotherapy. After a month straight in a hospital cot, Skylar finally returned to her own bedroom. Unfortunately, she didn’t get to enjoy it for long. Every night, she would sleep less and cry more, saying that her stomach hurt. When she went to the bathroom, she’d scream with a pain that sounded more wrenching than anything I’d experienced in a life eight times as long as hers.
We brought Skylar back to the hospital after only four nights at home. The doctors said that scar tissue from her last surgery had formed on her intestines, twisting them and obstructing her bowels. When Sharise told our daughter that she was going to have to endure another operation, Skylar said in the weakest, saddest, most innocent voice I’d ever heard: “Mommy, I don’t want to die.” She knew that what was happening to her was not normal, that all the smiles and jokes coming from Sharise and me were forced, that the relatives and friends who visited never used to cry when they saw her.
“The nice doctors are going to help you go to sleep for a little bit, while they do another operation,” Sharise said, dabbing the sweat off Skylar’s forehead. “And when you wake up, Mommy and Daddy will be right here waiting for you. We love you, honey. And everything is going to be okay. We’ll all be home again soon.” I needed to believe that what Sharise was saying was true as badly as Skylar did.
After the operation, Skylar looked even worse than before. I noticed for the first time how all the life had drained out of her face, how forced and short her breathing had become, how every ounce of baby fat had been replaced by bones pressing against skin. “Daddy,” she begged. “Please don’t let them cut me again.”
I didn’t know what to say: the doctors had already told me that her right kidney would have to be removed. Three days later, she was in the operating room again. And when the doctors wheeled her back, it wasn’t like the TV shows. They never said: “Congratulations, the operation was a success.” They said, “I’m sorry, Vince. But something unexpected happened. The cancer has spread to her liver, intestines, and dorsal muscles.”
“Did you remove the kidney?”
“No. We couldn’t even remove the tumor. It isn’t responding well to chemo. It has bonded so tightly to her kidney that to remove it would cause fatal blood loss. That, however, does not mean that there is no hope. There are other options available to us and, God willing, one of them will get rid of this thing for good.”
But “this thing” kept growing, consuming the girl I loved too much too late. On June 3, I received a call from the oncologist in charge of Skylar’s doctors. When you’re at the hospital every day, the last thing you want to do is pick up the phone at home and hear a doctor’s voice, because it can only mean one thing. Skylar had stopped breathing, the oncologist told me. The doctors had just placed her on a respirator and injected her with a medication that, in effect, paralyzed her so that she wouldn’t expend excess energy. She couldn’t laugh, she couldn’t move, she couldn’t speak. In four months, she had gone from a happy little four-year-old to a sad, wired-up mannequin. She never even had a chance to live, and now she was in a worse condition than most people in nursing homes. For all practical purposes, she was death with a heartbeat, though I tried to convince myself that it was just a temporary sleep.
She was a strong girl, though, and her body continued to fight the cancer. Her signs stabilized, her heart rate increased, and every now and then her lungs would pump a little air on their own. After a month and a half of this limbo state, the doctors decided that they had no choice. It was better to attempt to remove the tumor than just leave her hovering in and out of life. The operation was extremely dangerous, but if Skylar made it through, they said, it was very likely that she would recover.
Sharise’s family, my family, Sharise, and my son Neil joined Heidi and me in the hospital and we all sat nervously together, taking turns running out for food, while waiting for a word from the doctors operating on her. We fidgeted the whole time, unable to utter a sentence without bursting into tears. I thought about how cancer ran in my mother’s side of the family, and wondered if this was my fault. Or maybe I shouldn’t have let the doctors treat Skylar with chemotherapy in the first place. I should have told them to remove the kidney. I should have brought Skylar to the hospital when she complained of a stomachache half a year ago. Various thoughts ran through my mind, all containing those poisonous and impotent two words, should have.
Finally, after eight hours of anxiety, the doctors came out to say that Skylar was back in her room. They had successfully removed the tumor: it weighed six and a half pounds. That’s how much Skylar had weig
hed when she was born. I couldn’t even conceive of something that immense growing inside her.
I wanted to see what was killing my daughter, so I asked the doctors if they had kept the tumor. They brought me down to the pathology lab, showed it to me, and my stomach turned. I had never seen anything like it before: It was the face of evil. It lay spread out in a metal pan, a nacreous mess of shit. It looked like a gelatinous football that had been rolled through the depths of hell, collecting vomit, bile, and every other dropping of the damned that lay in its path. It was, in every conceivable way, the exact opposite of the daughter Sharise and I had raised.
In the process of removing the cancer, the doctors also had to take out Skylar’s right kidney, half her liver, some of her diaphragm, and a muscle in her back. How many more organs could a girl lose and still be alive? But she was breathing and the cancer was gone. Every day she recovered a little more, until she could speak and smile. Every gesture she made—a blink, a yawn, the word daddy—felt like a gift. I thought that everything would be okay now, that the nightmare was over, that Skylar could be a child again. I stopped drinking at Moonshadows and began cleaning up the house and my life for Skylar’s return.
Six days after the operation, I was walking into the hospital with a giant stuffed panda when I was greeted by the doctors. They had that look, the look that says everything and nothing at all, the look of bad news that must inevitably and regrettably be delivered. I braced myself, and knew before a word was spoken that I’d be back at Moonshadows that night.
“Vince,” the oncologist said. “It seems like an infection may be developing around Skylar’s left kidney.”
“That’s all she’s got left. What does this mean?”
“I’m afraid it means we’re going to have to operate again and clean up around the kidney.”